Having lived in Montreal for seven years, perhaps I should know a bit more than I actually do, but I haven’t been in Canada since the start of “corona” and so I don’t really know the details of the current situation.

What I do know is that Canada had very strict regulations, a group of truckers was not happy with the constant controls at the border and the vaccine mandates, so they decided to protest. The whole thing escalated into a huge popular protest, they’ve been for three weeks protesting in Ottawa, and now Trudeau declared martial law and is arresting on unknown charges the leaders of a completely peaceful protest, and freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated to them.

It would have been much easier to just drop the restrictions — most countries are doing it anyway, winter is ending and there was no point to most of those controls anyway — but I suppose the government didn’t want to accept defeat.

It is strange to discover that most Western governments are so much against their own populations. Most people are not happy with the constant controls and the ever-changing rules, so they protest. Shouldn’t governments respond to the wishes of their own population? But increasingly it doesn’t happen this way, and politicians just respond to bankers or big companies or whoever is paying them, and are completely blind to their voters.

There are rumours that Trudeau’s is actually Fidel Castro’s son; that is of course irrelevant to the situation and cannot be proven one way or another, but given what we know about Margaret Trudeau and having seen the pictures of her with Castro, that is a distinct possibility. However, he doesn’t have Castro’s charisma and it is unlikely that his political career will go on for much longer after this fiasco.

It is sad to watch what was a supposedly democratic country choosing the path of violence instead of dialogue or common sense, but I think the consequences of this very bad choice by the Canadian government will be felt for long afterwards.